Dr. Paull’s Theory: A Romance

CHAPTER I.

FATE.

Hugh Paull, house-surgeon to a great City hospital, was seated at his writing-desk. During his spare time he was working at a treatise on nervous disease, the special subject which attracted him. It was a day when a certain public event was disturbing the usual City routine. The thoroughfares near to the hospital were blocked, and his room was quieter than usual. He had almost forgotten that he was liable to be disturbed, when a tap came at his door.

“Wanted, sir. Accident just brought in.”

The porter spoke, standing in the doorway.

Hugh laid down his pen with a sigh.

“Has Mr. Hamley taken the case?”

“Yes, sir. They are getting him into the ward. Old gentleman—carriage accident. Horse frightened and bolted. Two bobbies brought him in.”

“All right, I’ll come.”

He put aside his manuscript, and went down to the accident ward. The “sister” of the ward, two nurses, and young Hamley, a dresser, were standing round the recumbent figure of a fine old man, who lay on his narrow bed still as death, his pale features composed, his 

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grey hair tossed upon the pillow. It was a grand face—a model for a painter.

As Paull neared the group the two nurses moved away to bring forward and unfold a screen.

“Take it away,” he said.

“I think he’s gone, or nearly so,” said the dresser, a fair young man, his face flushing. He had asked for the screen, usually drawn around the dying or dead.

“Nothing of the sort,” said Hugh. He felt the patient’s pulse, listened at his heart, opened the closed eyelids, placed his hand lightly on his brow, which was cold and clammy, then ordered him to be undressed, himself assisting the nurses to rip up the coat-sleeves.

There were no injuries. It was a case of concussion of the brain. The groom was having his slight wounds dressed in the out-patients’ department; and Hugh learned from him that his master, whom he appeared to hold greatly in awe, was Sir Roderick Pym, one of the partners in the well-known banking firm of Pym, Clithero and Pym. He had a town house in a West-end square, and a country house in Surrey, where he mostly lived. He was staying in town for a few days, and had insisted on driving towards the City to-day, in spite of the warning issued by the police to the public. Moreover, he insisted on driving a thoroughbred mare, who no sooner got among quite a small assemblage of roughs than she kicked up her heels and was off. The groom stuck to the tilbury till the final crash, but his master fell out shortly before. That was all he knew (or chose to tell). He was a town groom. He never went into the country. He would return home and tell Sir Roderick’s housekeeper. She would come round and see about their master.

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Hugh went thoughtfully back to the ward, and standing at the foot of the bed gazed at the solemn, set face of the unconscious man. He was interested—unusually so. This old man’s aquiline, grave face was full of expression. Peaceful and composed as it was now, it was the countenance of one who had suffered, and suffered deeply.

“His eyelids quivered a little when the ice-bag was applied, sir,” said the nurse who was watching the patient.

Hugh was once more gravely examining the case, when the stout, matronly personage, in a high cap and huge white apron, who was called the “sister” of the ward, came from the little room at its end, through the square window of which she could see all that was going on in the long room with the rows of beds.

“I thought I would give you these, Mr. Paull. I would rather not have anything to do with them,” she said, handing Hugh a massive gold watch and chain, a purse, and some letters and papers.

“I will see to them, sister,” he said.

Giving directions as to the immediate treatment of Sir Roderick, he returned to his room to lock them away in a small iron safe, where certain of the hospital books and cases of instruments were kept. The watch was a hunter. It struck him that the glass might be broken. It was. He shook out the fragments; then, seeing a locket attached to the chain, he opened that.

The glass of this was intact, and covered the coloured photograph of a woman’s face—sweet, bright, fair, with smiling lips and dark eyes, that even on lifeless paper looked mischief and pretty defiance.

He shut up the locket in a hurry—he had not meant 

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prying—and placing the contents of Sir Roderick’s pockets in a corner of the safe, turned the key upon them.

“This is my quiet day’s work,” he thought, with a sigh. It was useless to sit down to a scientific treatise, for which the most complete abstraction was an absolute necessity, when at any moment he might be summoned to this unexpected and important case; so he put the scattered sheets of manuscript together, and re-arranged the books of reference that he had piled on chairs by his writing-table in their rightful places on the book-shelves. Then he sat down in his American chair, and stared at the fire.

“A strange old face,” he was thinking, “massive, thoughtful. Quite a Rembrandt head. I wonder how old he is—whether he will get over it? Nasty shock, anyhow. Must have fallen on a soft bit of road; if it had been the kerb, or cobbles even, it might have been all over with him.”

It seemed to Paull that he must have seen that face before. Yet this could scarcely be. He had come to the hospital from his country home. He was the only son of the Rector of Kilby, in Derbyshire, and had seldom gone out, except to the museums and to scientific lectures; his ambition kept him chained to its object—his profession.

“The sort of face one sometimes dreams of,” he concluded. “I thought I was past nonsense of this sort. This latest thing in accidents has upset me as if I were a girl.”

Presently, the “gentleman’s housekeeper” was announced, and a portly dame, handsomely dressed in dark silk and a fur-trimmed cloak, entered. At once 

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Hugh banished all idea of the locket and Mrs. Naylor having the faintest connecting link.

Sir Roderick’s housekeeper was comely, and good-looking in her buxom way. But although there was anxiety in her enquiries, and evident relief in her manner when Paull gave her hopes that her employer might recover, the ruddiness did not forsake her cheeks, nor was she in the least flurried.

“I feared something might happen, that I did,” she said, accepting a chair. “The groom, David, he didn’t half like going behind that mare. Sir Roderick’s a first-rate driver; they do say at both riding and driving he can manage anything in the way of a horse. But there, I’ve seen that Kitty in the stable, and I know she’s that bad-tempered—but, lor! no one daren’t say one word to Sir Roderick.”

Paull asked if there were no near relations who might be sent for, or informed of her master’s condition.

“Mr. Edmund—that’s Sir Roderick’s next eldest brother—had dinner with him last night,” she answered, doubtfully, “But he’s taken his family to see the procession. Mr. Pym—that’s the eldest, the head of the firm—isn’t on what you might call good terms with Sir Roderick, who has nothing to do with the bank now.”

“Were those all?” asked Hugh.

Mrs. Naylor could not suggest anyone else. Sir Roderick—well, he was one of those gentlemen that you didn’t know how to take. You might offend him mortally, and you wouldn’t know it except by his never having anything to do with you afterwards.

“You would rather not take any responsibility in the matter then, Mrs. Naylor?” asked Hugh, slightly amused.

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The character of that strange man, lying for the present dead to the world without, was being unexpectedly revealed to him.

“I certainly would rather not, sir,” said Mrs. Naylor, briskly.

“But you will not object to give me his brother’s address?”

Mrs. Naylor being quite ready to give Mr. Edmund Pym’s address, Hugh wrote it down. Then he offered to take Mrs. Naylor to see her master.

From this she seemed to shrink; and it was only after being adjured that it was her duty to remain, at all events, in the hospital, until someone else belonging to Sir Roderick came—that she consented to visit the ward.

Mr. Edmund Pym arrived to visit his brother about nine in the evening: a singularly impassive personage, who showed no emotion whatever of any kind, and who departed as soon as possible.

Mrs. Naylor, evidently greatly relieved, slipped away after she had had a short interview with her master’s brother.

At ten o’clock the old man still lay on the hospital bed—breathing, living, but apparently dead to all around him.

“What do you think of him, Mr. Paull?” asked the Sister, as Hugh went his last round—at least the round which was usually his last.

“Think of him?” repeated Hugh, absently. “Oh—well—Dr. Fairlight will be here in the morning. He will take the case. Tell the night nurse I shall be down in an hour.”

“You’re not going to sit up, Mr. Paull?”

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“I think I shall.”

The Sister looked from patient to doctor, as Hugh went striding out of the ward, and back again to the livid, solemn face on the pillow…………………..